“What then am I to say to them?” Lord John spoke but after a long moment, during which he had only looked hard and—an observer might even then have felt—ominously at his taskmaster.
That personage replied as if wholly to have done with the matter. “Say anything that comes into your clever head. I don’t really see that there’s anything else for you!” Lady Sandgate sighed to the messenger, who gave no sign save of positive stiffness.
The latter seemed still to weigh his displeasing obligation; then he eyed his friend significantly—almost portentously. “Those are absolutely your sentiments?”
“Those are absolutely my sentiments”—and Lord Theign brought this out as with the force of a physical push.
“Very well then!” But the young man, indulging in a final, a fairly sinister, study of such a dealer in the arbitrary, made sure of the extent, whatever it was, of his own wrong. “Not one more day?”
Lord Theign only waved him away. “Not one more hour!”
He paused at the door, this reluctant spokesman, as if for some supreme protest; but after another prolonged and decisive engagement with the two pairs of eyes that waited, though differently, on his performance, he clapped on his hat as in the rage of his resentment and departed on his mission.
III
“He can’t bear to do it, poor man!” Lady Sand-gate ruefully remarked to her remaining guest after Lord John had, under extreme pressure, dashed out to Bond Street.